IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/fip/fedlrv/y1997isepp23-38.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Technical analysis in the foreign exchange market: a layman's guide

Author

Abstract

Economists have traditionally been skeptical of the value of technical analysis, the use of past price behavior to guide trading decisions in asset markets. Instead, they have relied on the logic of the efficient markets hypothesis. Christopher J. Neely briefly explains the fundamentals of technical analysis and the efficient markets hypothesis as applied to the foreign exchange market, evaluates the profitability of simple trading rules, and reviews recent ideas that might justify extrapolative technical analysis.

Suggested Citation

  • Christopher J. Neely, 1997. "Technical analysis in the foreign exchange market: a layman's guide," Review, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, issue Sep, pages 23-38.
  • Handle: RePEc:fip:fedlrv:y:1997:i:sep:p:23-38
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://files.stlouisfed.org/files/htdocs/publications/review/97/09/9709cn.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Martin Eichenbaum & Charles L. Evans, 1995. "Some Empirical Evidence on the Effects of Shocks to Monetary Policy on Exchange Rates," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 110(4), pages 975-1009.
    2. Shleifer, Andrei & Summers, Lawrence H, 1990. "The Noise Trader Approach to Finance," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 4(2), pages 19-33, Spring.
    3. Grossman, Sanford J & Stiglitz, Joseph E, 1980. "On the Impossibility of Informationally Efficient Markets," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 70(3), pages 393-408, June.
    4. Peter Fortune, 1991. "Stock market efficiency: an autopsy?," New England Economic Review, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, issue Mar, pages 17-40.
    5. De Long, J Bradford & Andrei Shleifer & Lawrence H. Summers & Robert J. Waldmann, 1990. "Noise Trader Risk in Financial Markets," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 98(4), pages 703-738, August.
    6. Jeffrey Frankel., 1995. "How Well Do Foreign Exchange Markets Function: Might a Tobin Tax Help?," Center for International and Development Economics Research (CIDER) Working Papers C95-058, University of California at Berkeley.
    7. Szakmary, Andrew C. & Mathur, Ike, 1997. "Central bank intervention and trading rule profits in foreign exchange markets," Journal of International Money and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 16(4), pages 513-535, August.
    8. Treynor, Jack L & Ferguson, Robert, 1985. "In Defense of Technical Analysis," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 40(3), pages 757-773, July.
    9. Engel, C., 1995. "Why is the Foreward Exchange Rate Forecast Based? A Survey of Recent Evidence," Working Papers 95-08, University of Washington, Department of Economics.
    10. Levich, Richard M. & Thomas, Lee III, 1993. "The significance of technical trading-rule profits in the foreign exchange market: a bootstrap approach," Journal of International Money and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 12(5), pages 451-474, October.
    11. Alan Kirman, 1993. "Ants, Rationality, and Recruitment," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 108(1), pages 137-156.
    12. Takatoshi Ito & Richard K. Lyons & Michael T. Melvin, 1996. "Is There Private Information in the FX Market? The Tokyo Experiment," Working Papers _005, University of California at Berkeley, Haas School of Business.
    13. Fama, Eugene F, 1970. "Efficient Capital Markets: A Review of Theory and Empirical Work," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 25(2), pages 383-417, May.
    14. Taylor, Mark P. & Allen, Helen, 1992. "The use of technical analysis in the foreign exchange market," Journal of International Money and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 11(3), pages 304-314, June.
    15. Lee E. Ohanian, 1996. "When the bubble bursts: psychology or fundamentals?," Business Review, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, issue Jan, pages 3-13.
    16. Mark, Nelson C, 1995. "Exchange Rates and Fundamentals: Evidence on Long-Horizon Predictability," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 85(1), pages 201-218, March.
    17. Sweeney, Richard J, 1986. "Beating the Foreign Exchange Market," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 41(1), pages 163-182, March.
    18. Meese, Richard A. & Rogoff, Kenneth, 1983. "Empirical exchange rate models of the seventies : Do they fit out of sample?," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 14(1-2), pages 3-24, February.
    19. Leahy, Michael P, 1995. "The profitability of US intervention in the foreign exchange markets," Journal of International Money and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 14(6), pages 823-844, December.
    20. Abhijit V. Banerjee, 1992. "A Simple Model of Herd Behavior," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 107(3), pages 797-817.
    21. Jeremy J. Siegel & Richard H. Thaler, 1997. "Anomalies: The Equity Premium Puzzle," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 11(1), pages 191-200, Winter.
    22. Narayana R. Kocherlakota, 1996. "The Equity Premium: It's Still a Puzzle," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 34(1), pages 42-71, March.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Lukas Menkhoff & Mark P. Taylor, 2007. "The Obstinate Passion of Foreign Exchange Professionals: Technical Analysis," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 45(4), pages 936-972, December.
    2. Christopher J. Neely, 2005. "The case for foreign exchange intervention: the government as an active reserve manager," Working Papers 2004-031, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
    3. Ledenyov, Dimitri O. & Ledenyov, Viktor O., 2015. "Wave function method to forecast foreign currencies exchange rates at ultra high frequency electronic trading in foreign currencies exchange markets," MPRA Paper 67470, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    4. Bertrand Maillet & Thierry Michel, 2000. "Further insights on the puzzle of technical analysis profitability," The European Journal of Finance, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 6(2), pages 196-224.
    5. Cheol‐Ho Park & Scott H. Irwin, 2007. "What Do We Know About The Profitability Of Technical Analysis?," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 21(4), pages 786-826, September.
    6. Neely, Christopher J., 2002. "The temporal pattern of trading rule returns and exchange rate intervention: intervention does not generate technical trading profits," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 58(1), pages 211-232, October.
    7. Christopher J. Neely & Paul A. Weller, 2011. "Technical analysis in the foreign exchange market," Working Papers 2011-001, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
    8. Jaehun Chung & Yongmiao Hong, 2007. "Model-free evaluation of directional predictability in foreign exchange markets," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 22(5), pages 855-889.
    9. Lee, Chun I & Gleason, Kimberly C. & Mathur, Ike, 2001. "Trading rule profits in Latin American currency spot rates," International Review of Financial Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 10(2), pages 135-156.
    10. Schmidt, Robert & Wollmershäuser, Timo, 2004. "Sterilized Foreign Exchange Market Interventions in a Chartist-Fundamentalist Exchange Rate Model," W.E.P. - Würzburg Economic Papers 50, University of Würzburg, Department of Economics.
    11. repec:wyi:journl:002068 is not listed on IDEAS
    12. Stephan Schulmeister, 2000. "Technical Analysis and Exchange Rate Dynamics," WIFO Studies, WIFO, number 25857.
    13. Stuart Landon & Constance E. Smith, 2003. "The Risk Premium, Exchange Rate Expectations, and the Forward Exchange Rate: Estimates for the Yen–Dollar Rate," Review of International Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 11(1), pages 144-158, February.
    14. Meredith Beechey & David Gruen & James Vickery, 2000. "The Efficient Market Hypothesis: A Survey," RBA Research Discussion Papers rdp2000-01, Reserve Bank of Australia.
    15. Dieci, Roberto & Schmitt, Noemi & Westerhoff, Frank H., 2022. "Boom-bust cycles and asset market participation waves: Momentum, value, risk and herding," BERG Working Paper Series 177, Bamberg University, Bamberg Economic Research Group.
    16. LeBaron, Blake, 2000. "Agent-based computational finance: Suggested readings and early research," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 24(5-7), pages 679-702, June.
    17. LeBaron, Blake & Arthur, W. Brian & Palmer, Richard, 1999. "Time series properties of an artificial stock market," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 23(9-10), pages 1487-1516, September.
    18. Kilian, Lutz & Taylor, Mark P., 2003. "Why is it so difficult to beat the random walk forecast of exchange rates?," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 60(1), pages 85-107, May.
    19. Annina Kaltenbrunner & Machiko Nissanke, 2009. "The Case for an Intermediate Exchange Rate Regime with Endogenizing Market Structures and Capital Mobility: The Empirical Study of Brazil," WIDER Working Paper Series RP2009-29, World Institute for Development Economic Research (UNU-WIDER).
    20. Taylor, Mark & Hsu, Po-Hsuan, 2014. "Forty Years, Thirty Currencies and 21,000 Trading Rules: A Large-scale, Data-Snooping Robust Analysis of Technical Trading in t," CEPR Discussion Papers 10018, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    21. Alessandro Beber, 1999. "Il dibattito su dignità ed efficacia dell'analisi tecnica nell'economia finanziaria," Alea Tech Reports 003, Department of Computer and Management Sciences, University of Trento, Italy, revised 14 Jun 2008.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Foreign exchange;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:fip:fedlrv:y:1997:i:sep:p:23-38. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Scott St. Louis (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/frbslus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.